Journalist, entrepreneur and marketing firm founder. I write about higher ed and early career issues. Pithily. I was pontificating about Millennials and Millennial culture back when they were still known as Gen Y.

Love In The Age Of Digital Media: What Drives Millennial Affection For Dating Apps?

It was bound to happen. First, there was Down (formerly Bang with Friends), which lets you determine which of your Facebook friends are interested in hooking up. Then, there was Tinder, which uses Facebook profile data and geographic location to allow users to anonymously like or pass on potential matches with a swipe of their smartphone screen. Now, there’s LinkedUp!, which has users identify potential dates based on data pulled from their LinkedIn profiles. It’s clearly aimed at those who aren’t averse to mixing business and pleasure.

Young, wired and living life on the digital edge — meet the Millennials. (Photo credit: TheeErin)

Last year, The New York Timesbemoaned that the reliance of twentysomethings on tech to mediate their personal lives was leading to the so-called “end of courtship” and creating a generation of daters who are able to connect screen-to-screen, but are utterly flummoxed by face-to-face communication. Back in February, however, TIME argued that the gameification of the dating and mating scene was simply old pick-and-choose impulses dressed up in new technology.

“It’s what mid-century makeout games like spin the bottle and pass the grapefruit were about. It’s strip poker and suburban key parties —whose spouse are you going home with tonight? It’s half the point of the game Twister, with its left-hand-red, right-foot-blue, and who knows what other body parts will bump up against each other in the process? Arm wrestling in a bar gamifies which man’s fitness display will best catch the eye of a woman. Four-inch heels ain’t worn for comfort; they’re worn because they give a woman an advantage over her friend who can barely totter around on three-inchers.”

A recent Wired piece about the so-called sharing economy hints at another reason Millennials feel comfortable blurring the lines between the public and private and the personal and professional. Jason Tanz argues that our detailed digital footprints coupled with technical interfaces and managerial backends that provides checks and balances on honest use create a level of trust that facilitates exchanges that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. While he focuses on companies such as Lyft (ride-sharing with strangers) and Airbnb (short-term home and apartment rentals), the same logic could apply to the Millennial attitude to romance in the electronic age. Daily exposure to personal data sharing on social media normalizes the process of swapping information and creates a culture of familiarity that results in Millennials placing greater faith in user-generated content than any other form of online media. They spend five hours a day interacting with their peers’ postings and find user-generated content – anything from a YouTube video to a Yelp review to a Tweet – 50% more trustworthy than other media sources like TV or newspapers.

In light of this data, dating apps that rely on peer-submitted (and, by extension, peer-vetted to a degree) content make all the sense in the world for Millennials. They also, in the case of apps that pull data from platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, have the added bonus of allowing users to curate a single cohesive networking that they repurpose for multiple ends – sharing creative content, finding a job, scoring a date.

While Tinder has been taking the dating world by storm – its CEO is claiming 1B matches to date – and LinkedUp! is currently testing the water with a select group of early users, we can already get an inkling of the cultural impact of how technology shapes Millennials’ ideas about love. Daniel Jones, editor of the NYT’s Modern Love column recently wrote about the increasing number of story submissions he receives focused on online-only relationships. The young paramours he describes never feel the compulsion to move beyond the technology-mediated contact dating apps and communications channels such as Skype provide.

“In love’s newest incarnation, students might spend their evenings Skyping and messaging deep into the night with someone they met online who lives five states away. Eventually they drift off to sleep with their laptops open only to wake up hours later, dazed and bleary-eyed, whereupon they tap their screens back to life and say a warm hello to their e-lover in another time zone,” he writes.

When it comes to love among Millennials, it seems there is both an app and an appetite for that – whether it’s a quick roll in the hay, a way to turn colleagues into conquests or just a screen to keep you warm at night.

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